Voice-controlled Asus Eee PCs this year

Does this spell the end of the keyboard?

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In an in-depth interview with Asus CEO, Jerry Shen, TechRadar recently revealed that much-improved voice-controlled Eee PCs and the futuristic Fold/Unfold laptop concept will be commercially available later this year.

Following a successful showing at CeBit in Germany earlier in March, the Taiwanese computing giant is certainly not resting on its laurels following the runaway success of the Eee PC.

Asus' Chairman Johnny Shih was keen to impress upon the gathered press and industry attendees at his CeBit 2009 presentation that Asus wants to see 'the end of the keyboard' and that his company wanted to do much more in the way of implementing speech recognition technologies in the future.

Voice-control in 2009

"Oh for sure," reiterated Asus CEO Jerry Shen, when TechRadar quizzed him further about voice-controlled computing.

"Actually, internally we have one team dedicated to studying voice recognition. Touch and gesture input is universal, whereas language is not universal.

"The first Eee PC or Eee Top products implementing voice-recognition and features will be ready by Q3/Q4 2009 – with our dedicated development team working with third parties in both Japan and the US and reporting directly to me. So this is something we will see very soon, later this year."